Social Fanzine #16

Social Fanzine #16

Last week was all the rage with Instagram coming up with stories feature. Users who opened their Instagram on a fine morning were in for a surprise as Instagram shared its own idea of sharing stories with followers, an idea *inspired* from the little white ghost – Snapchat. Mark Zuckerberg has tried in the past to add Snapchat to its list of annexations before, but now he went one step ahead and killed the social channel with this new feature. Adding a “Stories” section to Instagram is wise, no doubt since the photo-sharing social network has over 300 million daily active users, which is twice as many as Snapchat’s 150 million. The feature has gained popularity right from its launch and it will be thrilling to see to what extent this war will go, particularly when the cool crowd is not on Facebook and Instagram is trying its best to be the app everyone is pleased with.

Twitter, on the other hand, is trying its best to be your social news source, a channel where you pick sides and let people know. With the launch of its whole range of #Rio2016 emoji, Twitter has tried to establish its image of an increasingly sports oriented channel. During the Games, tweeting one of 207 country initials — #GRE for Greece or #THA for Thailand, for example — will trigger a miniature flag. Similarly, #Olympics comes with a gold wreath, #OpeningCeremony with fireworks, and #Gold, #Silver and #Bronze get mini medallions. Twitter has created mini icons for each sport, from #Fencing to #WrestlingGrecoRoman. Even golf, which obviously should not be an Olympic sport, gets a mini figure swinging a golf club. With so many mini icons at users’ disposal, it will surely be fun to tweet during #Rio2016.

Since a cool acquisition at the bid of $26.2 billion two months back, it was forecasted that LinkedIn will not show a favourable report in its evaluation quarter. However, the same turned out to be wrong. The professional social network reported second-quarter earnings that beat analysts’ expectations in revenue, driven by growth in new members and subscribers. Talent solutions — a package of recruiting tools and LinkedIn’s biggest revenue stream — pulled in $597 million, a 35 percent increase year over year. The network also reported 450 million members for the second quarter. That’s up from 433 million in April and an 18 percent increase from the year prior. With these numbers to show off, Microsoft can declare openly that LinkedIn was indeed a lucrative investment.